Sunday, January 31, 2016

We often compare today’s student radicals to the Red Guards
who terrorized and nearly destroyed China between 1966 and 1976. When it comes
to student radicals the Red Guards are the gold standard: the most violent, the
most empowered, the most depraved. After all, the did not just humiliate their
teachers. They murdered them and sometimes even ate their remains.

When it was happening, no one outside of China really knew what was happening
during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

When Richard Nixon traveled to China in 1972 the American press was presenting a rather positive view of the Cultural Revolution. In
France, radical students, more sophisticated and more hard line than their
American counterparts, took up the Maoist cause and tried to foment cultural revolution
in their nation.

And yet, Zha Jianying reminds us in his review of Ji Xianlin’s
account of his experiences as a persecuted professor during the Cultural
Revolution, we still know very little about the sufferings that were visited on Chinese
teachers and intellectuals at that time. Since Ji's book is a first person account, it
does not seem to address the experience of the government bureaucrats who were also
targeted.

For those who wish a different take, author Jung Chang recounts
the lives of three generations of Chinese women, up to and including the
experience of the Cultural Revolution in her book Wild Swans.

Ji Xianlin’s book matters because it provides us with a
picture of what the student revolutionaries did to their teachers, goaded by
Mao and his actress wife, Jiang Qing.

We know, or ought to know, that Mao launched the Cultural
Revolution in order to shift the blame for the famine that killed around
35,000,000 people in the early 1960s. After the famine, two Chinese leaders,
Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping tried to wrest party control from Mao. They wanted
to reform the economy by bringing in capitalist reforms.

When it seemed that they were about to succeed Mao rallied
disaffected students and told them to direct their anger at the
intellectual classes, teachers and party bureaucrats. Liu and Deng were
declared the number 1 and number 2 capitalist roaders. As you know Liu was
murdered by the Red Guards and Deng survived, largely because he was protected
by senior military officers.

Mao blamed the Great Famine on counterrevolutionaries in the
government and on the intellectual classes. Since he was infallible, his policy could not have been the problem. The problem lay in the way it had been implemented and in the mindset
that allowed people to believe that they could exercise freedom.

They were, by his thought, too attached to Confucian
thought, with its emphasis on the practice of propriety and the exercise of
discretion. During the Cultural Revolution the only book that anyone was
permitted to read was the little red book of the sayings of Mao. All other
books were banned. It was the most ambitious effort at mass brainwashing the
world has ever seen.

Mao hated Confucianism for the same reason that earlier
emperors had burned the writings of the great sage. Confucius was willing to
rely on people’s moral sense, their sense of shame, their sense of propriety
and decency. He did not want to regulate their behavior by giving them orders. Mao wanted people to obey his dictates to the letter, roughly as
earlier emperors had imposed legalistic restraints on their orders.

Mao’s Communist Party had always been interested in brainwashing
or thought reform. They must have believed that if they could control minds
they could control behavior. For an extensive study, see Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of
Totalism.

Chinese intellectuals were often happy to go along to get along.

Zha Jianying explains it in his review:

Under
the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), mass mobilization and political
campaigns became a national way of life and no one was allowed to be a
bystander, least of all the intellectuals, a favorite target in Mao’s periodic
thought-reform campaigns. Feeling guilty about his previous passivity, Ji
eagerly reformed himself. He joined the Party in the 1950s and actively
participated in the ceaseless campaigns, which had a common trait: conformity
and intolerance of dissent. In the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, more than half
a million intellectuals were denounced and persecuted, even though most of
their criticisms were very mild and nearly all were Party loyalists.

Ji was teaching at Peking University in 1966 when Mao
proclaimed the Cultural Revolution.

Zha describes the scene:

In
fact, he was doing just that in the first year of the Cultural Revolution.
Peking University was quickly transformed into a chaotic zoo of factional
battles, with frantic mobs rushing about attacking professors and school
officials labeled as capitalist-roaders-in-power.

The
long, screaming rallies where Ji, already in his late fifties, and other
victims were savagely beaten, spat on, and tortured. The betrayal by his former
students and colleagues. An excruciating episode in the labor camp: Ji’s body
collapsed under the strain of continuous struggle sessions; his testicles
became so swollen he couldn’t stand up or close his legs. But the guard forced
him to continue his labor, so he crawled around all day moving bricks. When he
was finally allowed to visit a nearby military clinic, he had to crawl on a
road for two hours to reach it, only to be refused treatment the moment the
doctor learned he was a black guard. He crawled back to the labor camp.

Intellectuals and bureaucrats were subjected to public
humiliation sentences and then punished by being sent to labor camps. In one
sense, it was also a cultural reform. If you want to cure people of the
proprieties and decorum of shame culture, if you want them to overcome the
strict barrier that exists there between public and private… you can begin by
subjecting them to public humiliation, to show them at their worst in public,
to force them to expose themselves, to the point where they experience
something roughly equivalent to a gang rape. At that point they come to believe that they have no self-respect, they have no face, they have nothing left to hide. Thus, they have no need to manifest good behavior
in public or to try to behave decorously and with civility. They will then replace
behaviors that contribute to social harmony with behaviors that involve them in
a permanent struggle and permanent drama.

Intellectuals are not notoriously courageous. They wilt
under stress. The extreme stress caused many of the intellectuals to turn
against each other, to denounce and betray each other in order to show that
they were true believing Maoists:

He
writes about Chinese intellectuals’ eager cooperation in ideological campaigns
and how, under pressure, they frequently turned on one another.

As Ji wrote:

Since we had been directed to oppose the
rightists, we did. After more than a decade of continuous political struggle,
the intellectuals knew the drill. We all took turns persecuting each other.
This went on until the Socialist Education Movement, which, in my view, was a
precursor to the Cultural Revolution.

In effect, they were being
acculturated in guilt. In a shame culture one is duty bound to show respect for
others. In a guilt culture one is duty bound to punish oneself for one’s
crimes, real or imagined. In China these were invariably thought crimes.

He writes:

To Ji,
this is a forgivable sin because if he and many other Chinese intellectuals
have been guilty of persecuting one another, it was largely because the
intellectuals as a class had been compelled to feel deeply guilty and shameful
about themselves. Ji described how this was achieved through the fierce
criticism and self-criticism sessions, a unique feature of the Maoist
thought-reform campaigns. Ji’s own ideological conversion was accomplished
through such a ritual.

As Zha describes it, the sense of guilt effectively replaced
a belief that they had nothing left to hide, and had no reason to maintain
their sense of shame. Thus, they were acculturated in guilt and self-punishment:

Ji
describes the overwhelming sense of guilt as “almost Christian,” which led to a
feeling of shame and induced a powerful urge to conform and to worship the new
God—the Communist Party and its Great Leader. Afterward, like a sinner given a
chance to prove his worthiness, he eagerly abandoned all his previous
skepticism—the trademark of a critical faculty—and became a true believer. He
embraced the new cult of personality, joining others to shout at the top of his
voice “Long Live Chairman Mao!” Through this process, millions of Chinese
intellectuals cast off their individuality. For Ji, the feeling of guilt became
so deeply engrained that, even after he was locked up in the cowshed, he racked
his brain for his own faults rather than questioning the Party or the system.

Zha’s analysis of the Cultural Revolution differs somewhat
from mind. Thus, it is worth examining:

Everyone
knows that Mao is the chief culprit of the Cultural Revolution. Well-known
historical data points to a tangle of factors behind Mao’s motivation for
launching it: subtle tension among the top leadership of the CCP since the
Great Leap Forward, which led to a famine with an estimated thirty to forty
million deaths; his desire to reassert supremacy and crush any perceived
challenge to his personal power by reaching down directly to the masses; his
radical, increasingly lunatic vision of permanent revolution; his deep
anti-intellectualism and paranoid jealousy. But, from the viewpoint of the
Party, allowing a full investigation and exposure of Mao’s manipulations would
threaten the Party’s legitimacy. If the great helmsman gets debunked, the whole
ship may go down. Mao as a symbol is therefore crucial: it is tied to the
survival of the Party state.

Zha raises an important issue here. Even after the leaders
of the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four, were arrested in 1976 there was
little national soul-searching and little public analysis of the events.

One reason might have been that so many people participated:

Then
there is the thorny issue of the people’s participation in the Cultural
Revolution. The Red Guards were only the best-known of the radical
organizations. At the height of madness, millions of ordinary Chinese took part
in various forms of lawless actions and rampant violence. The estimated death
toll of those who committed suicide, were tortured to death, were publicly
executed, or were killed in armed factional battles runs from hundreds of
thousands to millions. This makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to
bring all of the perpetrators to account.

Surely, this is a primary reason. The second reason was if
you want to restore people’s sense of shame you should begin by covering up. When
you get caught with your pants down, even when your pants have been pulled down
against your will, the first thing you to do take a step toward having a sense
of shame is to pull them up. The powers in China did not believe that anything
would be gained by a protracted soul-searching into the causes of the Cultural
Revolution. Nor did they seem to believe that those who were victimized by it
would be served by reliving its horrors.

Zha recounts that Ji became an active supporter of the
student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Surely, this was an act of
political courage. But, Zha does not mention an important point, namely, that whereas
we in the West saw the protests as the second coming of Woodstock, the men who
were leading China at the time were more likely to have seen the students as
the second coming of the Red Guards.

If one does not understand what the protests looked like
within the context of recent Chinese history one will never understand what
happened, why it happened, and why it did not cause the people to overthrow the regime.

3 comments:

Stuart: We often compare today’s student radicals to the Red Guards who terrorized and nearly destroyed China between 1966 and 1976. When it comes to student radicals the Red Guards are the gold standard: the most violent, the most empowered, the most depraved.

I'm too young to know about the Red Guard, but I wonder about the word "radical", does that word always imply violence? And who are "today's student radicals"? Are we talking about the Politically correct movement, with trigger warnings and 62 varieties of sexual gender?

It looks like Activist is the preferred modern language, and we can start that in part by the black Civil Rights activists of the 1960's like MLK and his attempt at nonviolent passive resistance to segregation, although there were certainly violent counter-parts like the Black panthers, although all that is also before my time.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_activism

Modern student activism seems more like students taking over the Dean's office until a college makes some statement against their school clothes being made in sweatshops. Some of them have even been known to dump file cabinettes on the floor to show their seriousness.

Or the recent Occupy Wallstreet movement after the 2008 financial crisis, and that was entertaining, with police refusing to help with crimes within the encampments while they carted in the homeless and druggies to encourage chaos, although it didn't need much help. I think the Occupy Foreclosures was a little more successful, especially when banks were too disorganized with their paperwork to legally claim their properties. It's interesting to see what happens when the system itself is chaos, it doesn't make much resistance to make trouble.

So yes I'm sure the Red Guard of China would not be impressed by such efforts.

Now the Western Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occuptation is a little more vigorous, but still hasn't hit a critical mass of support as the local town folks suggested they all go home, and even LaVoy Finicum's martyred death at the hands of the Beast hasn't yet generated the counter-revolutionary forces, but it might be simming before we really see how all sorts of greviances can all be collected together in a unified movement against federal authority.

Apparently all this movement needs is a continued Democrat president, and the U.S. can soon go from 112 guns per capita to 1120 when we really need them. You have to think Obama is getting some sort of kickback into this action, although we also need periodic school shootings to make sure it continues. And forget the Socialists - Bernie likes guns, we need Hillary to continue this important work in scaring the American male to keep spending to keep the economy from crashing.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_countryhttp://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/10/us/gun-sales-terrorism-obama-restrictions.html

What we know for sure, is students generally don't like guns, and are happier to be peppersprayed to show their persecution than shot, and they like to say "hand up, don't shoot" to try to shame the police. Besides they have a lot of debt to pay off before they can afford to die.

I'm not willing to bet where the new U.S. revolutionary forces will come. I sort of imagine the breaking point will be when the financial world gets their government representatives to reinstitute "debtors prisons" but considering we still have people robbing banks for $1 to go to prison to get a cancer treatment, we first need to make our prisons much less comfortable.

Cultural Revolution was sad and terrible, but many of its victims were not innocent.

Liu and the rest of them had played their part in creating a totalitarian system that demanded total obedience to Mao. And most of those professors who got beaten or killed had also been ideologues who'd enforced Maoist dogma.

Many party bureaucrats were purged and killed by Stalin, but they'd played a key role in aiding Stalin to absolute power. And many Germans eventually got burned by Hitler's mad wars, but they'd played their own roles in creating and enforcing the Hitlerian system. They were eventually victimized by the war, but they'd supported the man who started those wars.

While there were genuinely innocent victims of Mao during the Cultural Revolution, more often than not, the so-called 'capitalist roaders' were actually communists who'd loyally served Mao and did his bidding in killing millions prior to the Cultural Revolution. Killers got killed, oppressors got oppressed. Most of the victims were not 'Confucianists' but hardline communists who are not hardline enough in the eyes of Mao's rabid dogs.